I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Fanfest day three: Announced at Fanfest

The phrase "announced at Fanfest" has been a low-level EVE meme for the last few years. And it's usually associated with the future-looking EVE presentation which at recent Fanfests has coalesced around the "CCP Presents!" keynote on the final day.

So... yeah. Not everything announced at Fanfest can be taken at face value. ;-)

Still, some of the more wild stuff shown at CCP Presents in past years has become reality. Who would have guessed that orbital bombardment would be in the game only a year after it was rather famously announced at Fanfest 2012? Nobody, that's who.

More recently, CCP has given over CCP Presents to three elements. Humor...

...low-level marketing, and usually cautious high-level predictions about the direction the game might go, the latter part headlined by a "game trailer." And CCP stuck to that formula for the most part this year. The humorous element was provided by a new song by Permaband, this time sung by CCP Guard and CCP Hunter:

Very funny stuff, and an instant EVE classic! I've been having a hard time getting the chrous out of my head the last few days. ;-)

The marketing was provided by CCP Pokethulu and CCP t0rfifrans. The former announced that while Musterbrand is going to remain in control of the EVE store, they will be widening their product line to include more mainstream products like t-shirts. They will also be adding support for less expensive shipping to the United States. He announced that EVE will be receiving a new localized client later this year, in French. He also reminded players that the EVE Collector's Edition is now purchasable with PLEX and a new bonus for the "CCP Mystery Code" included with the package: a custom skin for the Rorqual. Finally, he announced that CCP will be expanding operations at the two biggest player-run gatherings at EVE Vegas and EVE Down Under (I've already bought my ticket for the former).

Torfi talked about the CCP partnership with Dark Horse Comics to produce the "True Stories of EVE" comic and said the next collaboration instead of focusing on a player story will focus on the back-story for EVE: Valkyrie. He also announced that CCP is starting a partnership with two model-making firms to produce models for the Megathron battleship and Nyx super-carrier. The latter will be truly monstrous: 28" long and available only in a limited run. Finally, he announced that CCP will publish a new version of their "Art of EVE" book next year.

For the high-level predictions of where the game might go, I want to focus on two things for this post. First, at the end of the presentation was the best trailer that CCP has released in the last couple of years, Prophecy:

This isn't the best thing the trailer team has ever done but it's definitely in the top three somewhere! In particular, I want to call your attention to the bit starting at 2:40, where multiple marine ships start a hostile boarding of the gate structure involving DUST 514 players. That's quite an intriguing notion! It would aggravate many of the alliances no end, particularly if this idea were expanded to the notions of boarding starbases... or capital ships. Similarly, I could see a situation in the far future where Valkyrie players would be needed to slip into tightly-defended areas to pave a path for larger EVE ships. Interesting stuff!

But to me, the most interesting notion of all is the idea of a single sign-on into all elements of the EVE Universe:

This takes the idea I've been pushing of a single sign-on for all EVE characters belonging to a single player and takes it a step further. During the same presentation, it was hinted that at some point in the future, it would be the very same capsuleer that would have skill points for EVE, Valkyrie, or DUST 514 depending on the interests of the player. It's certainly both a smart idea and a really nifty one... but can CCP deliver? I guess we'll see!

As I said, "announced at Fanfest" is a thing and I can't recall seeing the ability in the game to break into another player's Captain's Quarters and assassinate them with a sidearm... oh well. ;-)

And that wraps up my day-to-day Fanfest posts! But it doesn't quite wrap up me talking about things that were revealed at Fanfest. Next up: I want to focus on something that came up in the EVE-related keynotes, but stayed pretty hidden between the lines.

"I myself first heard this meme while playing EVE on a mobile device which I logged into using a key-fob two-factor authentication process. I was comet mining for technetium in a T3 frigate at the time but I was attacked by some Jove ships. So I decided to dock up in the ten-year station for a while."

"it was hinted that at some point in the future, it would be the very same capsuleer that would have skill points for EVE, Valkyrie, or DUST 514 depending on the interests of the player. It's certainly both a smart idea and a really nifty one..."

Nifty, yes. Smart? That's questionable. In a long-standing meta of EVE, most people have separate characters for combat, mining, indy, and hauling functions, not to mention caps, support, etc, because :skillpoints: and :clone costs:. Why then would people who won't even lump together major skillsets on the same char in EVE (except bads such as yours truly), want to lump DUST and Valkyrie skills on that same character too?DUST is FTP, therefore there's no cost of having a separate DUST account. Valkyrie, well, who knows that they'll do with that for a payment scheme, but as it is I'd have a hard time seeing them work a sub model for it (likely Valkyrie will be the true "MT" offering).So again, if there's no cost to having a separate account for the other 2 games, there is forseeably none of the benefit and all of the headaches of trying to load those skills onto your EVE characters.

Well, the worth of having an account on three games depends upon those games... Namely, how will be the replayability of Valkyrie? How many hours will someone play it before growing tired?

Valkyrie as a FPS befalls naturally into a "thrill and forget" niche -buy it, get some initial quicks, keep playing until those quicks become less and less thrilling and then go play something else.

And yes, I am aware that that's not what CCP haves in mind, but it's not as if CCP had a good record on getting the essentials right, is it?

Online FPS with long durability have it based on competition and practice -think of those COD guys spending hours upon hours to improve their K/D ratio. But then, VR helmets are incompatible with lengthy gameplay sessions. Has anyone CCP tried to play Valkyrie for, say, one hour? Or 90 minutes? How long it takes until something goes wrong with your body?

So let's say that you have an EVE account and CCP manages to deliver the multi-game account profile in time to be used along with Valkyrie... will it be worth the effort? How many players will still be playing Valkyrie within three months, six months or a year? And how many of those will happen to be EVE players who also play Valkyrie, and for how long?

You're forgetting us old guys. I've kinda topped out in my chosen fields on each of my characters. A few percentage points here and there aren't really making any sort of impact considering it's month long train times to get each those last few points.

So now it's kinda time to cross train way out of our niche. Do I need each of my characters to be able to fly a hulk? Nope. But one day it may come in handy. Who knows? And I got SP to burn.

So I can kinda play with Dust/Valkyrie SP rather heavily if I wanted to without hurting my Eve career. My problem comes down to the broken broken broken nature of Skill Clones.

There are certain things in Eve I already won't do because the price of a Skill Clone dwarfs my investment in ships and modules. FFA frigate events for instance. I'd love to drop 100mil in frigates and go lose a couple stacks for fun. But the Skill Clone price quickly climbs to over 10 times that. And I'm just not that space rich.

Now multiply it to how often you die in a FPS or Combat Flight Sim... and I'm just not going anywhere near it. At all.

Go to eve account management (https://secure.eveonline.com/), log in, then mouse over the 'Services' drop down and select "Eve Collector's Edition". There's a button at the bottom of that page for "Special Offer - 12 plex" which lets you obtain it.

"This takes the idea I've been pushing of a single sign-on for all EVE characters belonging to a single player and takes it a step further. During the same presentation, it was hinted that at some point in the future, it would be the very same capsuleer that would have skill points for EVE, Valkyrie, or DUST 514 depending on the interests of the player. It's certainly both a smart idea and a really nifty one... but can CCP deliver? I guess we'll see!"

When I first heard of single sign on. The first thing that pop to mind was that Valkyrie is going to be based on a paid subscription model like EVE,and that Dust514 is truly dead. Eve Legion is another tool for which CCP can use to go about this route since Dust is F2P.

The interesting thing is how CCP is going to implement all that if they keep different payment models for each game. It would be easier to implement to have all games ased on the same payment plan.

Question is do the amount we pay rises in the future, or doe us Eve players keep paying the same amount and get access to all three universe??

You have been with us from the start, through the good times and the bad times, and your business provided us all with a job, a roof over our heads and education for our children.Even during the bad times your Loyalty got us through the worst and gave us the opportunity to stay operating as a Company.

For your time and money, and the content you provided for 10 years in game, we wanted to thank the 10 year Customers with a special Station to call Home in Eve Online.However CCPgames crunched some numbers and it seems they do not add up, apparently it will take to much time and now their money to honor this pledge they gave you all last Fanfest; "It's been decided by our Development team that a Station is not the best use of resources."

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